We are excited to announce the winners and honorable mentions awarded in Archtober's 2025 Postcard Competition, which invited New Yorkers to respond to the prompt "Wish You Were Here." This second iteration of the competition drew inspiration from the 2025 festival theme, "Shared Spaces," asking design enthusiasts from around the five boroughs to submit their ideal public space in New York City. The resulting 40 submissions were reviewed by a jury comprised of four designers and architects: Annie Barrett, Founding Partner, aanda architects; Anjelica Gallegos, Director, Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning and Design (ISAPD); and Leigh Mignogna and Liz Turow, Principals and Founders, L&L Studio.

A sincere thank you to everyone who participated and submitted their visions and perspectives on the built environment. We hope you'll enjoy the three winning designs—congratulations to Olivia Baldacci, Megan Elevado, and Emma Sumrow! The jury also awarded three Honorable Mentions: Cara Cragan, Malavika Madhuraj, and Timothy Zhang.

The three winning designs will available and distributed at the Center for Architecture throughout the month of October, as well as featured in the fall issue of Oculus magazine. Please join us in congratulating our winners and celebrating the work of all the participants!

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New York Summer Collage

"As a collage artist, I reimagined New York’s public transportation using archival images from the NYPL Digital Collections. Inspired by the summer heat, I transformed the city’s humid subway into a playful swimming and ferry system, complete with a giant slide, as depicted in the Coney Island photograph. A canal runs through the scene, lined with plants, some offering vegetables for snacking during swims or boat rides. I included a fruit market stand, both for nutrition and as a tribute to the city’s essential fruit vendors. This ideal transportation system adds a fun and refreshing twist to your daily commute."

Olivia Baldacci (she/they) is a mixed-media artist based in New York City. She is interested in exploring how media helps form our cultural norms, specifically our conceptions of identity, in her work. Collage is her ideal format for this exploration as it utilizes real-world imagery that is intended to construct and reinforce norms. It allows her to interrogate these notions through the physical stripping and reshaping of images. Their work aims to extract meaning from a constant influx of images and, ideally, help others deconstruct these seemingly mundane images, which wield power over our understanding of the world.

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Meet Me on the Steps

"The stairs of The Met are a meeting spot, a place to rest, a prime people-watching location. Artists, historians, tourists, born and bred New Yorkers, vendors, performers, school groups, fashionistas, and celebrities, The Met’s steps welcome everyone. Climbing the steps is a ritual I practice frequently, starting with my MA in the History of Decorative Art and Design and then teaching at Parsons. The stairs are a microcosm of NYC, a consistent, but varying tapestry of people. I emphasized the architecture and downplayed The Met’s branding because the steps are a destination unto themselves. For the lettering, I played on The Met’s logo, selecting a
similar typeface, connecting the letters, and stacking the words. The curious pigeon reminds us that our common spaces are shared with fellow humans as well as the wildlife of NYC. Aside from the architecture, the pigeons might be the most permanent fixtures on the steps."

Megan Elevado is a daughter and descendant of island people with roots stretching across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines and the Atlantic to Ireland. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Megan is curious about what stirs humans on the instinctual, animalistic level. When all socialized pretense is put aside, what (visual, sound, smell, tactility) incites a genuine reaction, from joy to fear to discomfort to affection? Megan explores what resonates with viewers visually and viscerally through illustration, ceramics, and multi-media installation.

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The Vanishing Commons

"This drawing maps the qualities of public spaces that feel nearly extinct in New York Citytoday: clean air, nature’s soundscape, mutual stewardship, and shared access across species.Though the prompt asked for a vision of shared space, I was drawn to what this land once embodied: a space of true reciprocity, not extraction, shared not only among people but also between humans and non-humans. I asked myself: where is the "here" I’d truly wish someone were? In response, I drafted the elements of my ideal public space, realizing many once existed in symbiotic relation. Rather than depict a manicured or idealized landscape, I chose to represent the space as a word map that foregrounds interdependence and resisting dominant narratives of human control. 'Wish This Were Still Here' became both a memory and a call: for public spaces that hold ethical, ecological, and collective meaning beyond surface appearance."

Emma Sumrow (she/her) is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and a transdisciplinary architectural designer, researcher, and academic. Her work explores intersections of indigeneity, climate, psychology, and policy. Based in New York, she teaches at Columbia GSAPP and previously worked as an architectural designer at Bernard Tschumi Architects. In 2025, she founded studioSMRW to investigate intervention typologies through scalar experimentation. Sumrow’s work has appeared in ELLE Décor, and her research will be presented in the upcoming International Conference on Adaptive Reuse. She holds a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from TexasA&M University.

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Honorable Mentions:

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Where We Walk

"The weathered, rhythmic cobblestoned streets of downtown New York are woven with collective memory. These historic surfaces have carried us at our best and our worst, bearing the footsteps of countless New Yorkers and visitors alike. You were here with me—for years, for a second—and others were too, moving in every direction, every season, every hour. Each walk, each crossing, is different from the last, yet together they form a shared ground that holds our stories. When I miss someone, I walk these streets and feel their presence in the echoes underfoot. For this postcard, I sought out a stretch of intersecting cobblestones and hand-drew it, capturing the feeling: I wish you were here."

Cara Cragan is a New York–based designer exploring the intersection of architecture, culture, and everyday life.

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A Chorus of Neon Dreams

"Inspired by the cinematic mood of rainy NYC nights, this illustration captures the dazzling chaos of Broadway, glowing marquees, crowded sidewalks, and the quiet poetry of strangers crossing paths. I drew it entirely on the iPad using Procreate, layering cool tones with bursts of neon to evoke contrast and emotion. The theater signs pay homage to iconic shows while 'Wish You Were Here' adds a personal, wistful layer, a postcard to both the city and someone missing from it. This is the NYC I envision: alive with stories, longing, and light, even in the rain."

‍Malavika Madhuraj is an Architectural Designer based in New York and the founder of Lost__Lab, a visual platform that bridges architectural discourse with community engagement. With nearly 20,000 followers, Lost__Lab uses storytelling to spark design thinking across audiences. Malavika holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University’s GSAPP. Her work, driven by a passion for humanitarian design and social justice, has earned global recognition through awards, publications, and exhibitions, including at Roca Gallery in London and the Queens Museum in New York.

We Are Pollinators

"This postcard imagines a world where our built environments work with the land, not against it. People tend to the earth as farmers and beekeepers, families gather by the river, and communities thrive in harmony with nature. Rooted in an animist perspective, this vision calls for deep respect for the more-than-human world. It champions biodiversity, regenerative practices, and the creation of micro-habitats that sustain both human and non-human life. By reimagining urban ecologies, we ask: how can we design cities that welcome and integrate other species, fostering truly shared habitats?"

Timothy Zhang [he/they] is a NYC-based designer at architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm, Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill and a birdhouse builder. Timothy is dedicated to sustainability and incorporating eco-conscious practices into his designs. He also strongly emphasizes accessibility and universal design practices in the built environment. Timothy is actively involved in various organizations, working to promote diversity and equity in architecture.